This is interesting. Darren Heitner of Forbes is reporting that one agency which represents a lot of baseball players — Performance Baseball – is cutting its commission fees from the typical 5% to 1.5%:

”We saw a fiercely competitive landscape where everybody looked the same. The agents basically offer the same services, pretty much the same fee structure whether it is 4% or 5%, and I could literally hear the sound in my ear from a meeting a couple of years ago where a guy was saying ‘you guys are all really the same.’ My partner and I said let’s focus on what we do best and what we really enjoy doing.”

The article notes that, in reality, not all agents are the same, as some provide different services to their clients. Scott Boras, for example, famously has an entire operation of training, personal business management and general hand-holding professionals on staff to be one-stop shopping for clients. Others, like the guys at Performance, are more about doing the deals and that’s it. Yet, for some reason, all still charged the same basic commissions.

Interesting to see some agents go to the budget model (though I doubt they’d call it that). Maybe it will help disrupt the pattern in which some agents do a ton of work for a player between the ages of 18 and 25 or something and then get tossed aside for someone else just before the player hits free agency.

The Astros have made a contract offer of one year with an option to free agent pitcher Charlie Morton, Bob Nightengale of USA TODAY Sports reports. The amount of the contract offer is not known, but would likely be less than the $17.9 million qualifying offer the Astros failed to make to him.

Morton, 35, had the best season of his career in 2018, going 15-3 with a 3.13 ERA and a 201/64 K/BB ratio in 167 innings. It is likely the peak in what has been a late-career reinvention that started at the end of his tenure in Pittsburgh, persisted through an injury-shortened stint with the Phillies, and continued over the last two years with the Astros. Morton’s delivery, which famously mimics that of the late Roy Halladay, has seen his strikeout rate rise from middling to elite rates while his fastball velocity climbed from the low-90’s to the mid-90’s.

Despite Morton’s reinvention, he is likely going to have to settle for short-term deals due to his age and durability issues. 2018 was the first time in his career he crossed the 30-start threshold.